Every page can now answer questions about itself.

The clip

On 17 September a designer called Gustavo posted eight seconds of Foglamp's documentation with a two-word caption: "infinite faq". The FAQ has five questions in an accordion. The sixth row says "Ask anything else". Click it and the row becomes a text field, in the same list, same type, same hairline underneath. Type a question and one status line appears, "Reading the docs", then the answer streams in below with links to the docs. No chat panel, no avatar, no bubbles. The whole feature costs the page one extra row.

It had 673,000 views by the time we watched it the next morning, and the reaction was the same one we had: of course. A page should be able to take the question the author did not think of.

We build pages people send to other people: proposals, reports, dashboards, the deliverable that leaves the room. The reader of one of those has exactly the question the FAQ row was made for, and usually nobody to ask. We shipped our version the same day.

What we built

Turn on Let them ask the page and a small pill appears at the foot of the page, in the page's own typeface, reading "Ask this page". It opens into a field. The reader types "what happens if we want changes after launch?" and presses Enter. A caption says "Reading the page". A card rises out of the field and the answer arrives a phrase at a time: defects within 30 days are fixed for free, new features are quoted at the day rate. On the page, the two sentences that say so light up in amber, and the first scrolls into view. An "on this page" chip steps through them. Escape puts everything back.

That is the whole interaction. One question, one answer, from this page, pointing at where on the page it came from.

Three decisions

Foglamp's row is the right shape. It also has two gaps, and a document you send to a client has a third constraint, so we made three decisions the other way from a chat widget.

The page is the whole world. The model is handed the page as its only document and told to use nothing else. Not your other pages, not the web, not a knowledge base. A proposal answers as the proposal. It cannot be talked into a discount the proposal does not offer, because it has never seen anything but the proposal.

Silence is an answer. Ask a page who the company's CEO is when the page never says, and the reply is "That isn't on this page.", followed at most by the nearest thing it does cover. We tested that sentence before we tested anything else, because a document that invents an answer is worse than one that cannot be asked.

Every answer points. The model returns a citation for each sentence it relies on. The page finds that passage in its own text and highlights it. The highlight is the reader's audit trail, and it turns the box into a faster way to read the page rather than a way to avoid reading it. This is the part Foglamp's row does not do, and the part we would keep if we had to drop everything else.

What comes back to you

Every question a reader asks lands in the page's What came back section, beside reactions and notes. The ones the page could not answer are listed first. If three readers ask what it costs after year one and the page never says, you have the brief for the next version, in the reader's own words. The answers given are kept as well, so you can check what the page told people.

This is the reason we built it as a Stacktree feature rather than as a script anyone could paste onto any page. The questions are the signal, and the signal belongs next to the other things a page sends back.

The Markdown twin

The other thing that shipped today looks unrelated and is not. Every Stacktree page is now readable as Markdown at its own address: send Accept: text/markdown to the page URL, or fetch it with /_page.md on the end, and you get the page with headings, lists, tables and links intact and the design stripped. The HTML says so in a Link header and a <link rel="alternate">. Passcodes and client-space gates apply exactly as they do to the HTML.

That conversion is what Ask this page reads. It is also what the reader's agent reads. Increasingly the person you sent a link to has an assistant reading with them, and that assistant should get a document, not markup, from the same private URL. On the page itself, a browsing agent finds a WebMCP tool, stacktree_ask_page, that returns the same grounded answer with its sources. A link you send is now a page for the person, a document for their agent, and something both of them can ask.

What we left out

A conversation. There is no thread and no memory between questions; each one starts from the page. A persona: the box has no name and no avatar, and the answer has no preamble. Branding: the pill uses the page's own font and adapts to its background, so it reads as part of the page. And any answer from anywhere but the page. We may add a way for the owner to pin an answer to a question the page keeps getting, which would be the FAQ row growing back the other way. We will not add a way for the page to know things the page does not say.